Shuttle SN45G XPC - SFF Evolution - Overclocking

Coming of age in the past 12 months or so is the Small Form Factor evolution. Shuttle were the true innovator of this exciting new small computer market and today Cameron "Sov" Johnson takes a look at Shuttle's SN45G XPC which is based on nVidia's nForce2 Ultra 400 chipset. How does it compare to a full-sized desktop system? Read on and find out just how much of a punch this small little thing can pack!

When testing the SN41G2 XPC in the past we mentioned that the overclocking of this system was extremely limited. We are happy to report that this has changed with the SN45G. First off under the Frequency/Voltage control menu in the BIOS where you will find the overclocking options for the CPU multipliers, voltages, dividers and the Front Side Bus (FSB).

If you are lucky enough to have an unlocked AMD Athlon CPU (or have a T-Bread or Barton) you can change the CPU multiplier from 8x up to 25x. This allows for dropping the multiplier and raising the FSB, which yields better overclocking results 90% of the time. You can lock the AGP and PCI dividers to 66MHz for AGP and 33MHz for PCI, this keeps the video bus and PCI bus right on specifications, eliminating the AGP and PCI devices being the bottleneck. Memory ratios come in 15 different flavors for giving you as much control over the memory frequency as you could possibly want.

Voltage selections are quite generous. CPU voltage regulator can be set from 1.3v up to 1.85v in 0.025v increments. This allows for the safest voltage overclock on the CPU.

DRAM voltage adjustments are available this time. DRAM can be set from 2.5v up to 2.8v in 0.1v increments. This allows you to push as much speed out of your overclocked RAM as you want, within reason.

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